Spoon-Fed: Why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong

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The nutrition revolution is well underway and Tim Spector is one of the visionaries leading the way. His writing is illuminating and so incredibly timely. Yotam Ottolenghi This also gives some practical and useful ideas and insights into how you can do the best you can for your own nutritional health, without going into complicated label reading

One insight from the study is that people who consumed a greater diversity of plant-based foods pre-pandemic appear to be less susceptible to catching Covid-19, or becoming severely ill from it. While this doesn’t prove definitively that eating a diverse plant-based diet can ward off infections, Spector believes it could help: “Your immune system is compromised if you don’t have a good microbiome controlling it, and so it may either under- or overreact [to pathogens],” he says. “I don’t think eating for our microbiomes would stop pandemics, but I think it could make everyone less ill if they got infected.”Vitamin supplements like Vitamin D and Omega 3 get treated like foods and not drugs even though they are proven not to work Our liver naturally produces most if the cholesterol in our bodies and cholesterol in food doesn’t alter its levels in the blood to any extent. Many foods we now think of as healthy contain large amounts of cholesterol, essential for the health of our cell walls and a number of key vitamins e.g. oily fish, eggs and yoghurt Diversity cultivates a healthy microbiome – the micro-organisms living in our gut – which plays a vital role in digesting food, regulating our immune systems, and tweaking our brain chemistries through the chemicals they produce. “It’s that diversity of gut microbes that gives you a diversity of chemicals and, we believe, a healthier immune system and a better metabolism,” Spector says. “Once people start seeing that there is this link between the food we eat, our microbes and our immune systems, I think that changes the way we think about food. It’s not just fuel. It really is changing the way our body works.” In that respect it reminds me - to bring in a completely different subject here - of one of the useful tips acquired from trying to practice some mindfulness. Trying to take time to consciously appreciate a meal instead of wolfing it down. Whether its breakfast, lunch or dinner, being more acutely aware of how food tastes, what you like, and recognising what you're eating can perhaps help to focus the mind further next time you go for a shop. A professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, Spector has spent much of his career researching how our life choices and events fuse with our genes. In 1993, he founded the UK Twins Registry at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, one of the richest collections of data about identical and non-identical twins in the world.

If you suspect a food intolerance, experiment with your diet by conducting an exclusion and re-challenge diet, but don’t be conned into using these bogus tests One journalist tested herself using several different store or online allergy tests and ended up with a long list of “dangerous” foods, but with no agreement at all between tests There is no one-size-fits-all dietary recommendation. Different people have different sensitivity to salt, sugar, fat, different gut bacteria compositions (microbiomes). We have different preferences for when in the day to eat (e.g. whether to skip breakfast [which is ok to do, btw])Virtually no vitamin or mineral supplement has been shown to have any benefit in proper randomized trials in normal people, and increasingly they are shown to risk causing harm The problem with the 10,000 steps a day guideline; the step count doesn’t necessarily correlate with increasing your heart rate, and is not affected by intense activities such as weight lifting or cycling, so this will miss short bursts of exercise or even just brisk walking, which are likely to be much better for your help All evidence shows that regular eating of junk (aka ultra-processed) food leads to the greatest increase of weight and ill health compared to other foods. The trouble is, although identical twins have many similarities, they can often be quite different – despite sharing the same genes. “Trying to understand why one twin is sometimes overweight and the other skinny; one gets diabetes or cancer and the other doesn’t, has been a major theme for the past 20 years,” Spector says. Tim Spector’s kitchen fridge is swarming with life: kefir grains, sourdough mother, homemade kimchi and kombucha. Then there’s the vegetables: as varied and colourful as possible.